Hello, and welcome to the first iteration of the JavaWorld blogs! Launching blogs was one of my priorities when I started editing JavaWorld a little less than a year ago, so I'm thrilled to be up and running with them today.

The goal of JW Blogs is to provide a daily mix of valuable reading from around the Java world. Some of the blogs you'll find here are syndicated and others are exclusive to JavaWorld. Notably, most of them are written by JavaWorld contributors, past or present. We also welcome blogs from JavaWorld community members -- just send us a proposal. One thing I can promise is that all of the blogs you find in the JW blogsphere will have been selected for relevance of content and the technical expertise of the author. No fluff here! (Or, perhaps, only really good fluff need apply.)

One of the cool things about this blog platform (it's Drupal, by the way -- more about that later) is that you don't need to have a blog of your own to participate in this community. When you land on the blogs mainpage, you see the most recent posts from our bloggers, as well as the current tagged topics they're posting about. If you're interested in a particular topic -- say OSGi or Groovy -- just click on it and you'll land in that topical zone, where you should see posts from a variety of authors. If you have something to add to a discussion, drop a comment. If you have a lot to say about a topic, create a thread, tag it appropriately, and it will end up a post in that topical zone.

Commenting in other people's blogs and posting in topical zones is a great way to start building your reputation without the commitment of your own blog. For the same reason, we encourage you to register and create a profile; otherwise all your words will be signed "anonymous," which is no way to introduce yourself. (Note, also, that blog membership is currently not synced with JavaWorld forum membership. We apologize to our forum members for this inconvenience. The blogs are the first step toward a new, unified JavaWorld community platform, so please bear with us.)

So, about Drupal. It's a PHP platform isn't it? As you might think, the decision to go with non-Java-based blogging platform wasn't made overnight. In the end we chose Drupal because it is simply the most versatile and extensible open source, community-based CMS on the planet today. Or, to put it differently, there may have been an equally slick platform written in Java, but not open source. Also, Drupal is a particular favorite of Adam Gaffin, who does most of the coding for the JW community platforms. He sold me on it through sheer, good natured persistence.

There's a lot more to say about JW Blogs, especially as we continue to work on them in the coming weeks. We hope you'll ask questions and give us your feedback -- either by commenting here or writing Adam and me at jwblogs@javaworld.com. Your input will make a difference in this feature of JavaWorld, just as it does on the site as a whole.

Before I sign off, I want to give thanks to the writers who are already contributing to JW Blogs this week: Arun Gupta, Ted Neward, John Zukowski, Charles Nutter, and Andrew Glover. It's an honor and a pleasure, sirs.

On behalf of JavaWorld and the JW Blogs team --

Welcome!

Athen O'Shea
Editor, JavaWorld
athen@javaworld.com